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This chapter examines the interdisciplinary field of cybernetics as an emblematic site for the movement of digital principles from specific, technical applications to imprecisely deployed metaphors. The chapter tracks specific terminology and speculative claims about the possibility of behavioural prediction from tightly delimited work in ballistics, psychology, information theory, and computer science to highly general (and generalizing) applications in anthropology, economic theory, and management. In so doing the chapter demonstrates the historical and conceptual dynamics of control, as well as their proximity to the tendential expansion in space and time that characterizes capitalist accumulation.

This chapter offers an interpretation of the cybernetics movement that places McCulloch at the centre of the story. By doing so, it illustrates that McCulloch’s cybernetic project can be best understood in light of his interest in psychiatric foundations and the problem of mind and brain. Focusing on McCulloch’s translation of his psychiatric work into the language of cybernetics, his rhetorical strategies in promoting cybernetics, and the challenges he faced, the chapter also highlights the transdisciplinary nature of cybernetics. Further, it illustrates how, despite the origin stories of McCulloch and other members of the cybernetics group, and despite its association with the American unity of science movement, the cybernetics group was more disunified than is commonly argued.

Doors are architectural media that function as cultural techniques because they operate the primordial difference of architecture—that between inside and outside—and at the same time reflect this difference and thereby establish a system comprised of opening and closing operations. Taking Adorno’s lamentation that one does not know how to close a door anymore and Musil’s statement that doors are a thing of the past as points of departure, the chapter highlights epochs of the symbolic order as it is media historically connected to the history of the door. As confirmed by ethnography and historians of antiquity the door has always been linked to the law – be it the law of the city, divine or paternal law – an idea that culminates in Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” and in Jacques Lacan’s notion that the door is the symbol par excellence. In the Merode altar by Robert Campin (1425) thus the meaning of the door that processes the distinction between the sacred and the profane is transferred to the real unfolding of the triptych. The revolving doors and the automatic sliding doors of the twentieth century are no material implementations of the symbolic order anymore but thermodynamic and governmental machines that prefigure cybernetic machines in which the distinction between inside and outside as been replaced by the distinction between on and off.

It can be shown that the different conceptions of ‘simulation’ (the one of culture critique on the one hand and the denomination of technical applications on the other) that seem to be incompatible with each other can be reconciled on a single spectrum. Its basis in models, its replacement of reality, its lack of reference and of precession of the referent are some pejorative characteristics often emphasized in media philosophy with regard to simulations, for which the sciences applying computer simulations have no use for. It helps crossing over the views that first seem opposite to each other, but that turn out to be compatible if its root in reality is recognized and thus the representational logic is accepted at least according to the intention. The chapter combines ideas of the 'simulacrum' retrieved in the natural sciences with traces of cybernetic thinking in media studies. The whole study builds on a definition of computer simulation in the technical sense as the involvement with and the act of execution f a dynamic mathematic or procedural model that projects, depicts, or recreates a system or process.

This chapter theorizes an afterlife of Imperial Japan's biological metaphors of lifeworld and circulation in the work of Japanese architect Tange Kenzō and his associates who came to form the internationally renowned movement of Metabolism in the early 1960s. Transposing these imperial metaphors onto postwar Japan's national body politic, Tange and other Metabolist architects frequently used the biological metaphors of blood circulation and the central nervous system to articulate their vision of urban planning. Focusing on the impact of electronic communication technologies on architecture, this chapter will explore how the modern biopolitical idea of maintaining the organic life of the nation persisted into the postwar period, and how this perspective on biopolitics in turn compels us to rethink certain assumptions we make about electronic media and information technologies.

This chapter introduces the most prominent of the Soviet network projects: the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS) Project, its lead visionary Viktor Glushkov, his team, and the surrounding institutional landscape in 1962-1969 are described. The full decentralized and interactive ambitions of the project are described as first formulated, including virtual finance and automated economic planning. A snapshot of the playful even work culture of cyberneticists in Cybertonia suggests a local culture of camaraderie, resistance, and cleverness, despite the visions of building a single nationwide decentralized command economy. Initial informal institutional obstacles, including a broken alliance between two prominent research institutes, Glushkov’s Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev and Fedorenko’s Central Economic Mathematical Institute in Moscow, are also described.

This chapter introduces The Stack model in detail. The Stack is a platform, and despite our familiarity with that word, we do not have sufficient understanding of platforms as technical and institutional systems. Comparing them to States and Markets, we can appreciate how they enable unique kinds of sovereignty, both geographic and subjective. This chapter considers some key historical examples of computing platforms used to model and reform entire societies and economies, and considers these as precedent lessons our Stack model. It discusses the technical structure of software and hardware stacks, and abstracts them as a general model for complex systems architectures. The chapter also introduces the six layers of The Stack, Earth layer, Cloud layer, City layer, Address layer, Interface layer, and User layer.

This chapter develops an argument for what resistance might look like under conditions of infopower. Equally important, it also describes what forms such resistance to infopower are unlikely to take. A key argument is that resistance calibrated to infopower is irreducible to mainstream theories of democratic deliberation that presuppose information in such a way that they cannot confront it as a political problematic in its own right. The chapter criticizes influential communicative accounts of democracy that have structured much of recent normative political theory. Primary targets include the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas and the work of the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. The chapter shows why both of these theories are structurally unable to confront information itself as a political problem. A precursor for a more viable approach is found in the work of Dewey’s interlocutor, and sometimes foil, Walter Lippmann. Rather than suspending communication-centered politics by way of a turn to aesthetics (a prominent option for contemporary political theory), an alternative is sketched in a turn toward technics and technology. On this view, resistance to infopolitical fastening is best mounted at the level of designs, protocols, audits, and other forms of formats.

This chapter examines the example of Bateson and Margaret Mead, who as anthropologists made use of photography and film to record Balinese characters and culture. They took pictures and shot films of dances and trances and, as Holl suggests, became exposed to a magic that was the consequence not so much of Balinese trance techniques as of cinematographic technologies that they themselves had brought to Bali. In fact, they ignored not only the cinematographic time structure that creates an imaginary effect through the conversion of discrete pictures into movement perception, but also the illusionary and trance-producing aspects of film. They experienced the difficulties (perhaps the impossibility) of achieving a balance between scientific self-mastery and abandoning selfcontrol.

This essay is the first in the book’s Science, Fiction and Reality section. It was originally a paper read at a conference held at the University of Teesside in April 1995 and was later published in The Governance of Cyberspace. The essay talks about the evolution of science fiction and how it’s easy to spot when it has been overtaken by the development of technology; specifically in computers, artificial intelligence, robotics, and cybernetics. In her discussion of technology and cyberspace, Jones alludes to the possibility of consciousness, self-awareness and freedom of information, and makes reference to the science fiction novels of William Gibson and Pat Cadigan.

The final chapter analyses Robinson’s multiple award winning Mars trilogy. It considers cybernetic themes in conceptions of terraforming and biospheres, and synthesises two related concepts, Jed Rasula’s “composting” and Thierry Bardini’s “junk,” to characterise the ramified dialogism of terraforming narratives. It explores pastoral images of the garden and, through Simon Hailwood, brings to bear Nagel’s notion of intersubjectivity and the process of “stepping back” to account for the change of perspective toward the natural world experienced by various characters. This section continues with a discussion of the relationship between science and nature and its implications for environmental philosophy and science fiction before ending with reflections on how terraforming narratives combine myth, science, politics, social inquiry and aesthetics to explore human relationships to their environments.

Mexico’s successful bid to host 1968 Olympics necessitated the management of the country’s holistic and cohesive modern image for the worldwide audiences. Chapter 3 analyses the integration and mobilization of various design disciplines—especially built environment and visual communications—to produce and convey such an image. Focusing on the immersive participatory street environments designed for the Games, the chapter examines work of planner-architect Eduardo Terrazas, head of the urban design for the Mexican Olympic organizing committee—and compares them to the ideas promoted by the neo-avant-garde kinetic artists. It thus shows the seemingly neutral notions such as interdisciplinary collaboration, Gestalt psychology, and cybernetic responsiveness engender also frameworks of hierarchy, management, and the cult of expertise. The analysis demonstrates kinetic environments and technologies to be inherently open-ended and unstable, clearing space for the interventions of 68 Movement.

This chapter explores double-bind theory and the concept of power, including the sexist tendency among proponents to blame the mother. Similarly, radicals, liberals, and secular existentialists challenged the “tragic turn” as bourgeois accommodation to status quo power relations. The holism of systemic approaches foregrounded the old problem of whether nature supplies an ethic. Bateson and the double-bind research team struggled to account for power in the schizophrenic family in a way that blamed neither victim nor victimizer. Bateson's recognition of progressive stalemate in the schizophrenic family drew on the systems theory concept of runaway. Runaway in arms race policies, in turn, reflected political and theoretical conflicts between Norbert Weiner and John von Neumann, the leading mathematicians of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. In two essays, Bateson critiques the centrality of power in von Neumann's game theory. Meanwhile, Bateson's conflicts with the more pragmatic research team members, such as Jay Haley, lead him to cast about for a new direction. His eulogy for Frieda Fromm-Reichmann echoed a similar debate over political quietism between Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Niebuhr.

This chapter places Bateson's work with dolphins within a broader 1960s "dolphin mystique"--a cultural site where anxieties over modern science’s physical models went unresolved. Most associated with scientist John C. Lilly, the dolphin mystique had futurist, utilitarian, and romantic components, also found in a similar "outer space mystique." The chapter shows how Lilly's and Bateson's research goals differed through a further substantiation of the sources of Bateson's thought: the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (his theory of play, the concepts of positive feedback, negative feedback, servomechanisms, and the naturalization of teleology); and his father William Bateson and his career amid the ongoing conflict between Darwinist and Lamarckian theories of evolution. In Hawaii, Bateson expressed his isolation from potential peers and research frustrations in letters to old friend and Darwin granddaughter/scholar Nora Barlow. This isolation, however, allowed Bateson to articulate a justification for scientific inquiry that was neither utilitarian nor a value-neutral pursuit of truth, but an effort to establish an accurate depiction of the relationship between nature and the human self, which he called the riddle of the Sphinx.

Chapter 1 explores the modernist roots of evolutionary futurism through the uptake of Friedrich Nietzsche by the European avant-garde. Foregrounding the work of Mina Loy and P.D. Ouspensky, the chapter argues that modernism embodies evolutionary futurism through what I call an "inner transhumanism."

Chapter 2 discusses the "Superman Boom," a science fiction publishing phenomenon in the 1930s that coincided with the dawn of the Golden Age of SF. In addition to the fiction, this chapter documents the fan response that positioned SF readers as genetic supermen and inspired plans for fan utopian communities.